The art of Indian comics | Immortal stories of pictures
Photo is from Graphic India's 18 Days graphic novel.
Regional language based comics in India started to print their first copy from the year 1965. The first comic book of India was Amar Chitra Katha. Amar means immortal, Chitra means pictures and Katha means story. So, when I came of my senses, the culture of comic books were deeply engraved in most Indians. Remembering the old days and celebrating the new, I have gathered some of the these comic book pictures and their stories of my choices.
This is a cover photo of famous Chacha Chaudhary's series of comic books, created by Pran. He has a brain which faster than computer, and has a friend Saboo, who is the tallest and powerful man on earth, but he not from Earth. Chachaji also has a dog which as fast as rocket and the name is Rocket. The villein in this picture with gun is Raka, and he is the eternal enemy of Chachaji and Saboo.
Pran also created other funny weird characters named Pinky, Billo etc. All the pictures were hand drawn by him. The level of imagination he poured into these stories is till date remarkable.
Right side the picture is from Nagraj, he is the biggest comic super hero in India. He has so many numbers of special powers that you have to put an 'etc' at the end. But he is the king of snakes, and that is the meaning of his name. He was introduced by Raj comics. Raj comics used to print in Hindi only, I was introduced to it by my sister. From Raj comics I liked another one was Druva, below is his poster pic made by Sid Kotian.
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He also has uncountable number of super powers. But his intellect and captain figure made him different.He
introduced allies in the story. He evolved to become the Super Comando Dhruva.
One picture I have to share, is of my regional language(Bengali) comic book picture. Narayan Debnath started first comic books in Bengali, and his stories were simple yet the funniest. His drawings were his signature in the Indian comic book history, and I feel blessed to meet this person in face. This picture is from famous series Nonte Fonte.
This wave of culture suddenly got disspeared in India at around year 2000. Then the whole audience got changed. People started buying DC and Marvel comics as they could afford at that time. After coming to this age, having a job, now only I can buy those, yes it happens only in India. With these matured audience the writers became different. They became more funny, simple, complicated, detailed and big. Now, these are turned into graphic novels, rather than a comic book. Internet helped a lot to many independent artists in India to show their series of comics online. Most notable comic cartoonist of India is right now Faisal Mohd. who created Garbage Bin. It all started with a sharing a comic strip over Facebook page, and today it is the most famous comic series in India. Faisal tells stories of a notorious child Guddu, the stories are filled humor and sometimes hard core emotions. He is marvellous in paiting his stories and I admire him as genius for that personally. Below snap is from his Facebook page,
Now are also some other story tellers as Faisal, I do find Saranath Banerjess's illustration in his comic Corridor.
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The examples in current time also has evolved to creation of graphical novels based on our mythological characters, stories. Ramayana and Mahabharata, are two great epics of India, and thorough great great artists these are now turned into something unprecedented. The pictures are now more detailed and futuristic. People are now putting interest in learning the epic history. The cover photo of this post is from a novel named 18 Days(2010), which is based on the great and epic Kurukshetra War, that happened between Pandavas and Kauravas, for 18 days. Seeing these epic phenomenon through picture is something different.
This below picture is from another famous novel Ravanayan, picture by Sumit Kumar,
And, the last picture of my current list again from 18 Days, this is a picture of Brahma.
Image sources (chronologically) : 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9
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Photos from Kerala, India
My entry to BW phot contest